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Cardinals vs. Giants NLCS Game 7: Somehow, San Francisco lives to play another day

San Francisco Giants' Hunter Pence hits a three-run double during the third inning of Game 7 of baseball's National League championship series against the St. Louis Cardinals Monday, Oct. 22, 2012, in San Francisco.
(Photo by AP Photo/Ben Margot)

In the city nestled up against San Francisco Bay, the excitement for this team was a living, breathing thing.

By ANTHONY WITRADO
Sporting News

SAN FRANCISCO—This wasn’t supposed to happen for the San Francisco Giants. It just wasn’t.

Too much was stacked against them from the time the season was in its infancy. Closer Brian Wilson was lost for the year. Tim Lincecum lost his ace status with the worst season of his career. The Los Angeles Dodgers got rich and showed off. Melky Cabrera, their best offensive player, was busted for using performance-enhancing drugs and suspended for the remainder of the regular season.

After overcoming all that to win their division, they faced six elimination games in two playoff rounds.

Now, they are going to the World Series for the 22nd time in franchise history. They’ll face the Detroit Tigers here in Game 1 on Wednesday (8:07 p.m. ET, FOX).

The Giants pulled off an improbable comeback in the National League Championship series with an absolutely perfect night Monday. They demolished the St. Louis Cardinals, 9-0, in Game 7 at AT&T Park to win the series after being down three games to one.

During a season in which bad luck struck plenty, the Giants caught every break and flurry of good luck in the deciding game, from Pablo Sandoval’s tapper to score the game’s first run to Brandon Crawford’s leaping catch to save two to Hunter Pence’s triple-hit that somehow scored three more. This team went from counted out more than once to league champions in one of the more unlikely playoff runs in recent memory.

“This one seemed destined not to happen,” team president and CEO Larry Baer said as rain dripped from his hair and face in the stairway leading to the home dugout. “This thing was the improbable season, and now we take the pennant.”

It almost seems like the Giants don’t get going until they are down in a series and on the verge of having the trucks back into the clubhouse to pack up for the winter. The Cardinals had been the comeback kids, the darlings of baseball since last October when they did the unthinkable themselves and won the whole thing, but these Giants are on a different level.

It started here on Oct. 6 with Game 1 of the NL Division Series against the favored Cincinnati Reds. The Giants couldn’t pitch and they couldn’t hit that night, or the next, which left Cincinnati needing just one win at home to finish the series.

Then things started to happen. The pitchers pitched better. Lincecum embraced a new role as a shutdown reliever. The bats woke up. The breaks shifted.

“One more day” became their mantra, and the Giants became the first NL team to win a best-of-five Division Series after being down 0-2.

“We just came together. We play for each other,” said right fielder Pence, who was traded to the Giants from the Philadelphia Phillies at the July 31 deadline just before Cabrera’s suspension hit. “We love playing together and we just wanted one more day. That’s kind of the way we went about it. Give everything you got to get back to see each other again.”

That wasn’t enough for these new drama kings. They had to do it again after falling behind to the Cardinals. St. Louis was preparing to host its second World Series in as many years.

Once again, Pence and reliever Sergio Romo and pretty much anyone wearing the uniform shouted the team’s new motto. And sure enough, the pitching got better. The first stave-off-elimination win was produced by Barry Zito, the lefthander who had failed to live up to his plush contract in his six seasons with the Giants.

The hitting also picked up, led by series MVP Marco Scutaro, another trade acquisition and a guy who looked like he wouldn’t be playing after Game 2 when Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday trucked him on a takeout slide, injuring Scutaro’s hip.

Not only were both three-game playoff winning streaks improbable, but the ways those series turned in San Francisco’s favor were amazing to watch unfold. Balls found holes that they weren’t finding before. The opposing defenses made errors they don’t normally make. Grind-’em-out games from the starters turned into solid pitching lines and wins.

And in the city nestled up against San Francisco Bay, the excitement for this team was a living, breathing thing. Everywhere you went over the last three days, people here only cared about talking Giants baseball. Women wore orange blouses and black slacks through downtown’s hustle and bustle while men wore black suits with orange ties. The more casually attired donned every piece of warm Giants gear they could get their hands on, and in the last few hours before Game 7, finding a seat anyplace with a TV was next to impossible.

So when these people saw Matt Cain strike out the first hitter of the game, they stood and roared. When they saw Sandoval barely get his bat on a ball to plate Angel Pagan minutes later, they shook the stadium.

Finally, when they smelled the Cardinal wounds through the cold seaside air, they were right there along with their hometown team going in for the kill.

Afterward, when the raindrops were hard, heavy and unrelenting and the Giants celebrated on the field-turned-lake, the park stayed packed and deafening.

The team’s journey has captivated even passing fans, and even though there is a World Series banner hanging here from just a couple years ago, this run through the league tastes sweeter because of all the Giants have endured.

“The feeling was just don’t stop and keep pushing until the last out of the last game. Fortunately we haven’t been to the point where we’ve made the last out, so we’re going to keep going (hard) until this thing is done.”